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Novelist David Bezmozgis and The Free World

A new writer we love walks us through the historical events, objects, posters, and photographs that inspired his debut novel, The Free World

Every once in a while, there’s a new book by a writer you may not know yet, toward which we like to bump your gaze. For example, David Bezmozgis has a debut novel, The Free World, out this week, that’s such a pleasure to experience that it got us wondering how he went about concocting it, making this thing we like so much. Here’s the gist of it:

It’s 1978 and a three-generation family of Russian Jews is pushing toward the un-Soviet world—the eponymous free world. When the reluctant, Commie-decorated patriarch, Samuil, gets held up for medical complications, Rome—at the time, a sort of eastern émigré staging ground—at once becomes the family’s heat-soaked purgatory. Bezmozgis blends a deeply-felt affinity for historical vividness (as though eager to put to record the most treasured details from personal family stories…) with a quiver of adroitly-administered lyrical beats ("She looked to have beauty like a long blade, carelessly held") that sum to a story spilling over with that question, ever pervasive, of whether where you’re trying to go is better than what you’ve left behind. That concern, and the uncertain answers, serve as a sort of shared pulse for each of the family members as they navigate the summer. Is Calgary or Melbourne or Boston really better than Riga? Or for the most magnetic character in the book, the younger son Alec, is the long-blade beauty of a mistress really worth more than the plain loveliness of a new bride? Each character, sketched indelibly downstream to the source of their dilemmas and desires, has a different idea about what the next move can and should be. Which makes it even more compelling to watch them tear out in those competing directions, while yet remaining a family intent on making one leap together.

It’s a historical book in the best kind of way—pulpy and viscerally inspired by the digging, the real-deal research. It can hardly be considered nostalgia, but there’s a full-bodied respect (if not reverence) for the way things were thirty years ago, the way things looked. And in the book, there’s real integrity to those late-’70s visuals, made manifest in these attentively constructed set pieces that feel arranged for the stage or screen. Which is hardly coincidental: Bezmozgis, trained as a filmmaker and a respected director himself, is plenty up front about the ways in which pictures of things inspired the writing. So, because we think you’ll like the book, we thought a sort of visual walk-through by Bezmozgis of the images that inspired the novel-making might be more convincing than a straight-shooting conversation.